Which 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens' Character Did Bill Hader Help Bring To Life?
Just one day sits between us and the first nationwide screenings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. There's already tons of reviews for the movie out there, and we're bound to get a bunch more articles diving deep into the movie, talking about unanswered questions, predicting what's in store for the future and plenty more. It'll be a couple days before people start diving into spoiler territory, so in the meantime let's talk about an awesome bit of trivia.
Saturday Night Live veteran and Trainwreck star Bill Hader helped bring one of the new characters in The Force Awakens to life, and you can even see his name in the credits after the movie. So what was Hader's involvement? Hit the jump to find out.
Drew McWeeny over at HitFix noticed Hader's name with the credit of "BB-8 Vocal Consultant." Wait, what? We know there are droids who talk, but BB-8 seemed to be a droid in the same vein as R2-D2, speaking in a form of beeps and bloops. The sounds for the latter astromech droid were created by Ben Burtt, so it stands to reason that the sound team on the movie did the same for BB-8. However, there's a bit more of a human element to the ball droid's sounds.
Here's what Hader said when he was asked what being a vocal consultant for BB-8 consisted of:
"JJ fucking around with this sound effects app on his iPad that was attached to a talk box operated by me. It looked ridiculous but it made BB-8's voice. At first I tried doing a voice, but we all agreed it sounded too human."
This isn't the first time Hader has given his vocal talents to a film on the downlow. In fact, he's done some vocal work for J.J. Abrams before as a voice on the Enterprise. It's not clear how much of Hader's work with Abrams ended up informing the final sound effects for BB-8 in The Force Awakens, but there's probably some of the actor's voice in there somewhere. And what's interesting is that he's not the only comedian with a credit as vocal consultant for the droid everyone loved before even seeing the movie.
Ben Schwartz, who you probably know best as Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Recreation, also did some kind of vocal work for BB-8, though HitFix wasn't able to get in touch with him to find out what his experience on the film was like. Hopefully once the film is widely seen after this week some of the people who worked on it will finally start opening up about their experience, and maybe we'll even learn more about this Bill Hader BB-8 connection.
So when you hear BB-8 making his adorable little sounds in The Force Awakens, know that the guy who voiced Fear in Inside Out and always knows New York's hottest club helped make that happen. Maybe we'll see Hader doing more Star Wars work in the future. After all, he does some killer impressions:
Just one day until you get to see BB-8 in action on the big screen.